Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/26

Rh mood for a long time. They had given Italy the Pisani and Jacopo della Quercia. Then had come Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello and Luca della Robbia and his kin, and, as though this were not enough, man after man was sent into the world to make Italian sculpture worthy of Italian painting. Besides artists cast in giant mould like Donatello or Verrocchio, there were any number of sculptors so accomplished that they can scarcely be dismissed as forming, in a colourless way, the rank and file. Higher praise than that must go to Desiderio da Settigano or the Rosellini; to Mino or to Pollaiuolo; to Matteo Civitali or to Benedetto da Maiano. Nor was Tuscany alone thus bountifully endowed. Pisanello and Matteo de Pasti had been showing at Verona how the Renaissance medal might be made to rival the antique coin. Other masters might be cited from other regions. The country everywhere had more or less reason to congratulate itself on its sculptors. Then the effort seems to be too much of a strain, a kind of blight falls upon plastic art, and only one figure, that of Michael Angelo, continues to illustrate the grand style down into the sixteenth century.

It is as though fate had done all that could be done to place models of what sculpture should be before Cellini, but had grudged him the voiceless whisper, the invisible spark, the impalpable something in the air, which had thrilled the generations just preceding his own, and had caused masterpieces to appear before men as nature causes fruits and flowers to